NEW YORK, NY -- New York City served as the ideal setting for the 2012
annual meeting of the National Numeracy Network, with this year’s theme of
“Quantitative Literacy at Work: Navigating the Worlds of Journalism, Finance,
Business, and Citizenship.” The conference opened on Friday, October 12th, with
a dinner at Lehman College in the Bronx. Andy Serwer, Managing Editor of
Fortune Magazine, who was named Business Journalist of the Year in 2000 by
NewsBios, delivered the keynote address at the dinner.
Serwer engaged his audience –Lehman’s President Ricardo Fernández and
Associate Provost Robert Whittaker, CUNY Dean Karrin Wilks, and 90 NNN
members–with stories beginning with his mathematically inclined father’s
influence on his childhood to the recent controversy at Fortune when he called out
Jack Welch for claiming that numbers in the most recent Jobs Report were cooked.
Serwer won over the NNN audience when he related how Carol Loomis describes
people as “numerate” as a compliment and “innumerate” as a put-down.
The conference continued on Saturday at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College in
Manhattan. Over 100 participants took part in 32 concurrent sessions offered
throughout the day: 28 half-hour presentations and 4 longer panels. CUNY
Quantitative Reasoning Fellows, graduate students in various quantitative fields,
served as moderators for the shorter talks, one of which described a new CUNY
initiative, “Numeracy Infusion Course for Higher Education (NICHE).” Last year
CUNY was awarded $600,000 from the National Science Foundation for the threeyear NICHE project to promote quantitative reasoning (QR) instruction and
assessment in undergraduate courses in a broad range of disciplines and to develop
an on-line QR course for faculty. Two of the leaders of this grant project – Esther
Wilder (Sociology, Lehman College) and Frank Wang (Mathematics, Engineering
and Computer Science, LaGuardia Community College) – worked with NNN
leaders Nathan Grawe (Carleton College) and Eric Gaze (Bowdoin College)in
arranging the conference.
Among the half-hour presentations on journalism were Michael Ranney’s (UC
Berkeley) talk “How Journalists and Educators Can Help Preserve Earth’s
Biosphere by Improving Numeracy and Scientific Informativeness”; Barbara
Selvin’s (Stony Brook University) “Quantitative Course for Journalism Students”;
and Jessica Ancker’s (Cornell University) “Evidence and Inference: Statistical
Literacy for Midcareer Journalists.” These three professors were joined by Mark
Hansen (Columbia Journalism School) for a longer panel on QR and Journalism.
Several sessions described recent work linking QR with finance and business.
Dorothy Wallace (Dartmouth) described on-going initiatives in financial literacy,
including the work at the new Financial Literacy Center (a joint center of the
RAND Corporation, Dartmouth College, and the Wharton School) to promote
informed financial decision-making. Jean Richard and Annie Han (Borough of
Manhattan CC) described how they promote QR through business applications and
Edward Volchok (Queensborough CC) described collaborative team projects used
to enhance QR among business majors. Caren Diefenderfer, NNN President and
Professor of Mathematics at Hollins University, convened a panel on Financial
Internships at Hollins. Panelists included Judy Morrill (Highmount Capital),
Nandini Roy (Ernst & Young), Raisha Kasaju (Citigroup), Pauline Khoo (JP
Morgan), and Anqi Liu (job searching).
Sessions on QR and citizenship included a talk on civic engagement by researchers
at Indiana University’s National Survey of Student Engagement; several sessions
dealing with personal health and information shared between doctors and patients;
a presentation on QR and public policy; and a session on QR courses dealing with
citizenship at Parsons the New School for Design. Other sessions investigated: QR
in students’ writing; the assessment of QR and scientific literacy; the creation of
new QR courses; and the QuantwayTM alternative approach to developmental math,
by the Dana Center at UT-Austin and the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching. Eric Gaze (Bowdoin) addressed the recent controversy
over the New York Times editorial, Is Algebra Necessary? Gaze’s talk focused on
a better way to teach algebra based on the curriculum he has developed for his QR
course involving spreadsheets and modeling.
Neil Lutsky (Carleton College and NNN emeritus director) described this year’s
conference as “the best yet,” for its many concurrent sessions, the timely and
important theme, and the large number of participants. First time NNN conference
attendee Art Bardige (Enablearning) raved about the quality of the sessions and the
“opportunity to engage in conversations with others working to improve students’
quantitative reasoning skills.”
Next year’s NNN annual meeting will be held in San Diego, CA, in conjunction
with the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ Conference, October
31-November 2, 2013.